John Hugh Adam Watson, CMG

 

Below are five obituaries published in The Times of London, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Charlottesville Daily Progress and The Journal of Political Science and Politics.


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Text from Obituary in The Times (UK):


Adam Watson.  Diplomat and academic of broad erudition who was an early member of the English School  of International Relations.

Adam Watson was a distinguished diplomat, academic and author whose career spanned seven decades.  His formidable intellect and breadth of learning made him one of the leading figures in the study of international politics since the war.


From 1960 he was a member of the newly formed British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, later known as the English School.  This group of academics and practitioners in the field of international relations – including the historians Sir Herbert Butterfield and martin Wight and later the political scientist Hedley Bull – came together to study the relationship between states and to analyse the rules and norms governing the formation and evolution of what they termed the states system and the international society.

John Hugh Adam Watson was born in Leicester at the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914.  His father, a banker, was stationed in Buenos Aires where Watson spent the first years of his life.  He returned to England to attend school and was educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge.

He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1937 and was posted to the British Legation in Bucharest in 1939, where he was stationed when war broke out.  At this time he struck up what became a lifelong friendship with the broadcaster and writer Reggie Smith and his wife, the author Olivia Manning, whose wartime novels included a fictionalised caricature of Watson.

With the German invasion of the Balkans, Watson was posted to the British Embassy in Cairo in 1940, where he was designated to handle the surrender of Egypt in the event that the British lost the battle of El Alamem.  In 1944 he was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow.

After the war, Watson joined the Foreign Office and in 1950 he was posted to the British Embassy in Washington.  In the same year he married.  He was appointed head of the African Department at the Foreign Office 1956-59, and was involved in the Suez Crisis.  At this time he was also appointed British Consul General at Dakar.

Over the next few years his remit covered most of French West Africa, being appointed Ambassador to the Federation of Mail 1960-61, and to Senegal, Mauritania and Togo 1960-62.

From 1963 to 1966 he was British Ambassador to Cuba, a position that required the utmost diplomatic skills in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of President Kennedy.  In 1966 he was appointed under-secretary at the Foreign Office but in 1968 he decided to retire early from the foreign service.


From 1968 to 1973 he was diplomatic adviser to British Leyland, but after a short interlude lecturing at the Australian National University in Canberra, he moved to Paris to take up the position of Director General of the International Association for Cultural Freedom and also assumed the chairmanship of La fondation pour un entraide européene intellectuelle, another charitable organisation concerned with intellectual freedom of expression. 

Watson had begun his career as an author with works including The War of the Goldsmith’s Daughter (1964) and Nature and Problems of the Third World (1968).  In 1979 he accepted the position of Gwilym Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and from 1980 to 1995 he was a professor of international studies at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It was during this period that his most productive and stimulating work in the field of international affairs took shape.  After the death of Butterfield, he edited and finished the historian’s last work, The Origins of History (1981).  The following year he published Diplomacy: the Dialogue between States, widely regarded as a seminal work in the field.  Together with Bull he edited and partly co-wrote The Expansion of International Society (1984), but it was with his own acclaimed The Evolution of International Society (1992) that Watson made his greatest contribution to the study of state systems.  This was followed by The Limits of Independence (1997).

Watson’s insatiable appetite for knowledge and intellectual investigation  never left him and he continued to lecture and write to the end of his life.  His valedictory work was Hegemony and History, published this year.

Formal in outward demeanour, but always approachable, Watson was an accomplished linguist and a polymath whose interests and pursuits covered a bewildering range.  In addition to his academic writings, he wrote a number of plays for the BBC, including an adaptation of Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring.

He was made a Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1958.  He is survived by his wife and their two sons and a daughter.

Adam Watson, CMG, diplomat, academic and author was born on August 10, 1914.  He died on August 21 2007, aged 93.


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Text from obituary in The Telegraph (UK)

Professor Adam Watson, diplomat and academic who redrew the map of international political theory.

Watson defined diplomacy.  Professor Adam Watson, who died on August 21 aged 93, was a pre-eminenent figure in the study of international relations. His career, first as a diplomat and later as an academic, combined the practice and theory of international politics in a way that afforded him a unique insight into this complex and evolving subject.

Watson’s involvement in the field started in the late 1950’s when he was invited to join a group of eminent historians led by Sir Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight.  What later came to be known as the English School set out to lay the foundations for a modern theory of international relations.  For almost half a century, sometimes in collaboration with others such as Hedley Bull, but more often on his own, Watson applied his intellectual rigour and historical knowledge to redrawing the map of international political theory.

As a former diplomat, Watson stressed the importance of diplomacy in international relations, coming close to a Realist – almost Clausewitzian – position, and arguing that diplomacy had “reached its full flower as an art” in the European states system from the Italian Renaissance to the end of the First World War.  He pointed out that professional diplomats were often sceptical of ideology and argued that contemporary diplomacy had four primary tasks.  These were: information gathering abroad; the analysis of such information by foreign ministries at home; developing policy based on that information; and communicating such a policy.



John Hugh Adam Watson was born on August 10 1914 and educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied history under Butterfield.  Having joined the Diplomatic Service in 1937 he was stationed in the Balkans and Egypt during the early part of the Second World War, and in Moscow towards its close.

In 1950 he served at the British Embassy in Washington before being made head of the African department at the Foreign Office in which position he had to contend with the Suez Crisis.  In 1958 he was appointed CMG.

Watson was ambassador to the Federation of Mali (1960-61) and to Senegal, Mauritania and Togo (1960-62). His time in those posts, he explained in
Hegemony and History (2007), led him “to think hard about the place in our international society of the small and weak states incapable of real independence in the sense of being able to manage modern statehood without considerable outside aid”.

Watson then went to Cuba (1963-1966), and was there at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination.  He returned to England to serve as Under Secretary at the Foreign Office (1966-1968), before leaving to take up a position as diplomatic advisor to British Leyland.

In 1973 he accepted an invitation from Hedley Bull to become a guest lecturer at the Australian National University.  For a brief period in the mid-1970s he worked in Paris as the head of two international charities set up to help publish the work of intellectuals living under oppressive regimes.

He was then appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where he continued to work for the rest of his life.

Watson’s most significant published contributions to the study of international politics were
Diplomacy: the Dialogue between States (1982); The Expansion of International Society (co-edited with Hedley Bull, 1984); The Evolution of International Society (1992); The Limits of Independence (1997); and Hegemony and History.

Among his other writings were
The War of the Goldsmith’s Daughter (1964) on medieval Indian history; The Origins of History (1981), Butterfield’s last work, unfinished at his death, which Watson edited and completed; and several plays for BBC radio.

Adam Watson married, in 1950, Katharine Anne Campbell, who survives him with two sons and a daughter.


The Washington Post, September 14, 2007

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The Charlottesville Daily Progress, September 5, 2007

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Obituary in PS: Political Science & Politics, January 2008 (pp. 230-231)

John Hugh (“Adam”)Watson, C.M.G.

On August 21, 2007, John Hugh “Adam” Watson died in England at 93.  A graduate of Rugby and a scholar at 
Kings College, Cambridge, he served in numerous diplomatic posts, including British ambassador, assistant undersecretary of state, and undersecretary of 
state for NATO Affairs. A noted international relations theorist, Watson taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and resided both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Mayfield, East Sussex, England. In 1958 he was named 
a commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. As recounted below, Watson had splendid dual careers in diplomacy and academics.

Adam Watson’s most telling scholarly contributions came after his retirement from a fascinating and highly productive diplomatic career that spanned the period from 1937 to 1968. Stationed in the Balkans in the late 1930s, Watson became the last person to vacate the British embassy in Romania in the early stages of World War II, in his words “locking the door and making off with the key” after the government there joined the Axis side. In 1940 the British Foreign Office assigned Watson to its Cairo embassy, where he served as a special liaison to the Free French forces, in that way assisting the military campaign that eventually ejected Germany from the Middle East and North Africa. In 1942 Watson was instructed to handle the surrender of Egypt to Germany should the Allies lose the battle of El Alamein. By 1944 Watson had been transferred to the Moscow embassy to take advantage, among other attributes, of his fluency in Russian.

Late in the 1940s Adam Watson returned to London to work for Sir Ralph Murray at the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office that endeavored to counter Soviet propaganda during the early Cold War years. In 1950 Watson married American Katharine Anne Campbell, shortly after starting a five-year term at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., where he served primarily as a British liaison officer to U.S. intelligence. Thereafter, this time capitalizing upon his fluency in French, he directed the African Department of the Foreign Office for critical years that included much of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya as well as the Suez crisis. In 1959 he became consul general in Paris, directing British relations with French colonies in Africa. Given his earlier experience
as consul general at Dakar, Senegal, in 1960 the Foreign Office named Watson the first British ambassador to the Federation of Mali and, thereafter, to the west African countries of Togo, Senegal, and Mauritania. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis he was sent to Havana for a three-year ambassadorial stint, and later in the 1960s he worked with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, serving for a period as Britain’s assistant secretary for NATO Affairs.

In retirement from diplomacy Watson spent five years counseling the British Leyland Motor Company, before again playing a notable role in public affairs, directing tow Swiss human rights foundations in the mid-1970s. He chaired La fondation pour ene entraide europeenne  intellectuelle, an organization that promoted intellectual freedom of expression, and he served as Director General of the International Association of Cultural Freedom. This group dedicated itself to bringing dissident intellectuals living in communist or authoritarian regimes to Europe for short periods to deliver lectures, make professional contacts, and find publishers for their written work, while supplying them with books. 

As for his own intellectual contributions, in the late 1950s Watson was invited to join the precursor to the English School, the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, coming to serve as its chair in the 1970s. This elite study group brought together preeminent scholars from a number of disciplines and helped to develop the systemic study of international relations by examining the relations between states in different historical eras and across diverse civilizations. In 1964, after nearly two decades of research while in the British Foreign Service, Watson published his first book, The War of the Goldsmith’s Daughter, examining the Muslim conquest of South India during the Middle Ages. For him this was an early milestone in what became a lifelong interest in imperial and hegemonial rule across time and space with a focus that stretched to pre-modern societies. After a year’s sabbatical at Nuffield College, Oxford, Watson wrote a critique of colonialism, entitled Emergent Africa, published in 1967 under the pseudonym “Scipio,” a reference to the Roman leader who had defeated Hannibal.
Starting in 1978, Adam Watson served on the faculty of the University of Virginia, first as a diplomat-in-residence and Gwilym visiting professor, thereafter as a professor of international relations and a member of the University's Center for Advanced Studies.  In 1981 Watson completed The Origins of History, the last book of the late Sir Herbert Butterfield, his original mentor at Cambridge University, and in 1984 he co-edited with Hedley Bull The Expansion of International Society. In his own right he was the author of another six books: The Nature and Problems of the Third World 1968, Toleration in Religion and Politics 1980, Diplomacy: The Dialogue Among States 1983, The Evolution of International Society 1992, The Limits of Independence 1997, and Hegemony and History 2007. Several came to be considered foundational English School works, and over the years Watson garnered many impressive reviews within the international relations discipline.  Bull, for instance, declared that Watson’s work on diplomacy was “the most penetrating we have had for many years.” Barry Buzan and Richard Little termed The Evolution of International Society  “magisterial,” and John Vasquez called it “a stunning success . . . a masterful piece of theoretical and historical analysis.” In his later years Watson turned his intellectual energy toward non-state actors, aid, and other economic factors, and the impact of international politics on individual human beings. Watson’s many scholarly contributions in understanding international systems and societies were particularly distinguished by the breadth of his historical knowledge, coupled with his ability to distill insights from his knowledge of the practice as well as the theory of international politics. He is widely considered a founding member of the English School of international relations theory.

A prodigious reader with a great love of poetry, Watson included among his many intellectual achievements writing and helping to produce four plays for the British Broadcasting Service. He was also an extraordinary linguist, who had studied at the University of Madrid,  Freiburg am Breslau, and Marburg an der Lahn. He spent his early boyhood as the son of a British banker stationed in Argentina, and he eventually added fluency in German, French, and Russian to his command of Spanish and English. Even late in life he felt comfortable with written Italian and Portuguese, though he confessed, well into his 80s, that his Romanian had become a bit rusty!

Adam Watson had the exceptional perspective of a leading practitioner as well as a top theorist of international relations. He had participated in the making and implementing of foreign policies from World War II through much of the Cold War. He had seen first-hand the likes of Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and V.M. Molotov, serving on occasion as Churchill’s Russian translator, and he was closely acquainted with other historical figures, including Fidel Castro, George Kennan, and Kim Roosevelt.  Nevertheless, when pressed on the issue at an International Studies Association panel held in his honor in Montreal in 2003, Watson firmly declared that he had no interest in writing an autobiography, preferring to spend his last years continuing to progress with what he termed his “voyage of exploration into the uncharted  realms of international relations theory.”

Those of us who had the exceeding good fortune to know Adam Watson personally recall a man of great wit, warmth, and love of family. His interest in people, in what they might have to say and what he might learn from them, never flagged. His pale and penetrating blue eyes were constantly on the alert, assessing, scrutinizing, and questioning, but with a gracious and kindly light, particularly for his students with whom he regularly developed great rapport and took exceptional pains to keep up with over time. For many years at his house in Charlottesville Adam would bring together small circles of Virginia graduate students and faculty. Complemented by the cheese and wine, Adam would engage, stimulate, and, every once in a while, referee, with a touch that was light and caring and insights that were profound and original.  He was that rare intellect that was prepared, to the last, not only to take a fresh look at important issues, but to join with others to try to create new and better approaches and explanations. Soon after his death, his longtime friend and faculty colleague at the University of Virginia, Inis Claude, recalled, “He was a man whose achievements, professional and intellectual, were nothing short of extraordinary, and whose personal qualities were equally great; he inspired admiration and affection in equal measure. We will not see his like again.”

Julie Bunck
Michael Fowler
University of Louisville